The Prison Industrial Complex

For-profit prison companies, businesses that supply goods and services to prisons, politicians who benefit by trying to appear "tough on crime", a misdirected "war on drugs" and other forces have merged to create the largest incarcerated population in human history right here in the land of the free - the United States of America. The articles on this page explore this issue.

Mary Sutton: Members of the Los Angeles No More Jails Coalition took their fight against the expansion of LA County’s notorious jail system to one of the proposed construction sites at the Pitchess Detention Center in the city of Castaic.

Angola3News: Ultimately, the people of the U.S. need to rise up and fight back against the imperial prison state, which is also an imperial torture state, decimating minds, bodies, and souls throughout the country on a daily basis.

Dick Price: With jails straining to absorb thousands of prison inmates, jailhouse guard-on-inmate beatings grabbing headlines, and public concern rising about possible spikes in crime rates, public safety issues have Angelenos of all stripes scrambling for answers.

Anthony Samad: This new public discourse around the “school to prison pipeline” is not new at all. It was a predictable outcome of social control planning where the prison industrial complex started forecasting how many prison beds would be needed based on fourth grade test scores two decades ago.

Christie Thompson: Prison officials have blamed crowding for contributing to “an increase in riots and disturbances.” And the more inmates there are, the more likely it is that prison officials will respond to violence with broad-brush security measures.

Bruce Reilly: Few Americans are privileged to see the “help” a mentally ill prisoner can expect to receive if they are acting out or “decompensating,” to use the medical term. This incident is nothing special; similar procedures happen in every prison across the nation.

Bruce Reilly: I highly doubt any of the 99 players of the Florida Atlantic Owls were consulted about playing in The GEO Group Stadium next year, named after the world’s largest prison-owning corporation. I also doubt I need to illustrate the percentage of the Owls roster who are Black, or the percentage of The GEO Group’s “roster” are Black.

Kevin J. McCarthy: When the public finally has to choose between educating its youth or building and maintaining another prison, it is my hope that reason and reasonable will start to prevail. The mighty social planners have attempted to stave off that dilemma by transferring state prisoners from one state to another to fill up any beds

Angola3News: Being sent to a control unit prison is tantamount to torture. Prisoners are held under conditions that today are not considered ‘humane’ even for animals. They are an extreme abuse of state power.

Carolyn Sufrin: Despite its unanimous passage in the legislature two years in a row, Governors Schwarzenegger and Brown have vetoed the bill, disregarding the recommendations of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association.

Progressive Issues

Rosemary Joyce: Archaeology has a checkered history of exploitation by totalitarian regimes. Treating the question of what materials from the past should be preserved, studied, and thus valorized, as politically neutral is part of the reason for that history.